Question:
I am 28 years old and would like to have a hair transplant. I am embarrassed to admit that I have quite a bit of anxiety about the procedure. Is a transplant painful? Will I be awake?
Answer:
You will be awake but most of our patients are given a Valium to relax them and the procedure itself involves no pain. We use a very mild Wand, which is a mechanical device for injecting the xylocaine into the area where we are going to be working. This is done very slowly and is basically painless. We use a long-acting anesthetic so that patients do not have any problems with pain all during the process of removing the donor hair and placing in the transplant hair.
The procedure takes approximately six hours for a large graft area to get the graft material, cut up the transplant material and place it into all the small holes that we make. However, all that time the patient is lying on a table fully relaxed and listening to music. We rarely ever get any complaints of any pain for the procedure, either with the anesthesia process and the injections or during the placement of the transplanted tissue.
Posted by Richard Galitz, MD, FACS
